Huxley: the devil's disciple

Ever since Leonard Huxley published his father's Life and letters (1900) and P Chalmers Mitchell wrote Thomas Henry Huxley (1900), there has been a steady production of Huxley biographies-one a decade, on average. Most of these are cast in the mould of a traditional historiography, hailing Huxley as the courageous, truth-seeking champion of Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Houston Peterson entitled his contribution Huxley: prophet ofscience (1932), and both William Irvine and Cyril Bibby, in their respective Huxley hagiographies, similarly surrounded Huxley's head with the halo of Darwinian sainthood. More recently, Huxley scholarship has begun to follow a different line. Michael Bartholomew, in a 1975 paper, and Mario di Gregorio in his T H. Huxley's place in natural science (1984), pointed out that Huxley entertained serious doubts about the efficacy of natural selection and for several years kept it out of his own work. Others have drawn attention to the fact that during the 1840s and 1850s Huxley was a fierce critic of evolution, who wrote the most savage of the many negative reviews of Robert Chambers' Vestiges. Thus a rather different Huxley has emerged, one to whom Darwin's theory was less a scientific truth than a theory with which to fight a broad-fronted battle for social change and self-advancement. The most iconoclastic of these revisionist studies is Adrian Desmond's Archetypes and ancestors (1982) in which the dark side of Huxley's characterscheming, opportunistic, no more saintly than his arch-enemy Richard Owen-is highlighted. The Darwinian prophet of truth appears to have been the Machiavelli of the Victorian evolution debate. The sub-title of this new study of Huxley, The devil's disciple, might suggest that Desmond has continued his iconoclastic line on Huxley, yet this turns out not to be so. Having previously done a demolition job on Huxley's traditional pedestal, Desmond has now put in place a new one. Instead of a truth-hero, a class-hero is made out of Huxley-a man who came from nowhere, and who in spite of major social disadvantages and the bigotry of the ruling Anglican establishment fought his way to the top of Victorian London. Already in Archetypes and ancestors, and more so in The politics of evolution (1989), Desmond introduced into the historiography of the nineteenth-century evolution debate the factor of British class polarity: evolution was taken on board by the social underdogs because it seemed to underpin their hopes for a break-up of the social status quo, whereas the idea was opposed by the establishment for precisely the same reason. In Huxley, Desmond uses this class-model to maximum advantage, constructing a dramatic narrative that shows a proud and pushy "Tom Huxley", rising from "the dockside slum&-tQ the presidency of the 'Parliament of Science', the British Association for the advancement of Science", all the way "hacking at the obstructive Anglican edifice". Desmond offers much new detail based on an extensive study of Huxley's correspondence. The story of Huxley's Rattlesnake voyage in particular is recounted with riveting close-ups. During the Sydney stopover, Huxley met his wife-to-be Nettie, and throughout the book, Desmond craftily interweaves their personal relationship with the other, more public threads of Huxley's life. One can argue that Huxley's background was not as disadvantaged as Desmond indicates, and that the Anglican control of English science was not as strangulating. One can also point out that Desmond's racy and gripping style has been produced at the expense of in-depth discussions of both Huxley's palaeontology and of the secondary literature. Like Desmond's (and Moore's)